JeffreyWKramer

Re: Are there ever too many points?

Re: Schmucks? That falls into the category of "things mortal man was not meant to know!" There lies madness, my friend.

Re: Schmucks? Dr. D's biggest immediate concern, should the earth blow up while he is on his orbital base, will be "Where do I go conquer now?" Then he starts scanning for feasible alternate Earths which have so far escaped the notice of V'han and other extradimensional sorts.

Re: Schmucks? Originally Posted by jackalope Well, the problem with that, again, is that at the default starting point of 350, characters that are designed for that purpose and are not built on uber-cheese constructs will simply *fail*. You could give each member of the Champions Duplication (x4) and they would still lose a fight with Dr. Destroyer. Eventually your characters who start at 350 could easily have the XP to face DD as a team, but there's currently not anything in the official CU that explains how the world would continue to fare well until then. That's why some argue that for the sake of internal consistency, it would make sense for there to be a few official NPCs out there who are tough enough to do the job until the PCs get to that point. Building higher-point characters is of course a viable option - one I am doing in the New Sentinels campaign. Eventually they will be taking on Dr. Destroyer, Skarn and beings of that caliber. Of course, some consider those point levels to be cheesy in and of themselves, but what can you do?

Re: Schmucks? We are talking about the idea of Reed expanding his brain, to improve his intellect above the already-high level it functions at? That was, I believe, established by Grant Morrison in FF 1234 and *is* canon. It does *not*, however, account for his typical functioning. Reed just standing around has an obscene intellect, one that transcends any living real-world human by several magnitudes (the closest might be Stephen Hawking). In game terms, you have to go with a bare minimum of 30, which is listed as "epic human." When Reed does the "cerebral expansion" routine - which, to date, we've only seen him do when he is in an isolation chamber, surrounded with stimuli-dampening equipment - he temporarily makes himself become even smarter. Through somehow altering his own neurology *and* by shutting off external stimuli so he can focus 100% on intellect, he gains a boost to his already-impressive intellect. The exact degree of boost is unclear, but in FF 1234 it allowed him to figure his way through one of Doom's plots. Anyhow 1) the ability is canon. It was referred to in this week's issue of WOLVERINE, of all things; and 2) the idea some have suggested, of mimicking any of the FF on 350, is patently silly. You could have made the original version of Sue on 350 - the one who could turn herself invisible and turn others invisible (Invisibility UBO and UAA), and that was it. You could probably build the very first version of Ben on 350 - as bricks go, he was probably more or less Ironclad back then. You could have built very, very early Johnny Storm back then. But even then, you'd be hard-pressed to build Reed unless you used super-questionable constructs such as a Skills VPP. Even then, Reed had incredible intellect and a boatload of skills - and I'm sure anyone who has ever tried to build a good Batman analogue can tell you how much *that alone* can cost. Toss in starting stretching powers *at least* as good as Zig-Zag. By FF 50 (the first appearance of Galactus), Ben had become vastly more powerful than his starting point. He was already able to hit hard enough to make the Silver Surfer know he'd been in a fight. By that point Reed had made numerous technological break-throughs which still have not been duplicated or surpassed in the Marvel Universe by anyone except possibly Doom (they tend to work in different areas, not overlapping, though Reed grants Doom as being the superior in terms of things such as Temporal Physics). Heck, one of Reed's very first in-story inventions - unstable molecules - had not been independently duplicated by anyone in the MU last time I looked. By that point, Sue had started to develop her force field powers. These have grown by leaps and bounds over the years. By every account - both in terms of documented in-story feats and by statements of Reed, Doom, the Watcher and others who would know - Sue is easily the most powerful of the FF in terms of sheer, raw power, and someone - I beleive it was the High Evolutionary or Apocalypse, though I'm not sure - referred to her as the single most powerful baseline (i.e., not mutant or Inhuman or whatever) human being on the planet. Point-wise... she's very tough to build. She can do a lot of her tricks at once, meaning you're talking an EC or an obscenely large VPP or MP for most of them, and she has duplicated many of her high-end stunts often enough to indicate you need more than Powers Skill to represent them. In building her, one has to keep in mind the raw power she's demonstrated - she's used her FF containment barriers to contain and move entire large buildings, and her fields can withstand the Hulk's full-strength battering for a time.

Re: Schmucks? Not really, as I haven't seen any open charges of lying, treason or incompetence flying around on this thread, and I think everyone on this thread is more articulate than W.

Re: Schmucks?

Re: Schmucks?

Re: Schmucks? I personally think the standard 350 is fine, and not at all "schmuck." It's not Superman or the Surfer, but hey, my very favorite comic character is Wildcat. Thing is, I like characters at all the different point levels. For Champs, it's all a matter of what you want to play and how you choose to represent that level. In the Champs U, as a default setting, I think it's fine to go with 350 start, but I also think it's good to have the setting display the full range of heroes.

Re: Non-"adventuring" Metahumans I should point out here that at least in the default CU, the most basic of VIPER agents costs 178 points. Anyone with the degree of training required to be a Secret Service field officer should probably fall at least within that range. So, I'd say sans gear, 130+ points would be minimum, and 150 would be a good ballpark figure. Obviously different individuals will do things differently, but having read about the sorts of training Secret Service personnel undergo, I have a hard time believing they'd be less competent than the lowest VIPER spudge.

Re: Schmucks? If she ambushed them, I'd take her 9 of 10 or better. She could decimate their team easily with an ambush, between range and sheer power. If they ambush her successfully, it will likely be them winning with the same results or better.

Re: Schmucks? Or Gravi Missile Deflects. If she negates to do so, she has a 14 OCV, vs her 12, and he's lost his ranged attack until he has a chance to get it back. For that matter, given her DCV, his hitting is not exactly a foregone conclusion. Assuming he can be 300" away and still see her - depends on too many factors to really know, as we haven't established setting - that's not a bad idea. Still that darn Missile Deflection, though, plus he has only an 8 OCV and her base DCV is 10. That's probably the biggest danger so far, and a significant one. Which, depending how things had gone up to then, might be significant or might not. If Gravi wasn't surprised, she's going to be doing a lot better than you suggest. Assuming she negated to missile deflect, she's unlikely to be successfully Deflecting at this point, so it's quite possible Black did some damage, and she may or may not be blind. If she's not blind, Mentiac probably won't hit her, given relative OCV/DCV, but if he does, she's going to be hurting, due to his Find Weakness. Gladiator isn't likely to be a significant factor. Now, to take it the other way, if this fight starts with Gravitar having even a moment prep, she's going to be up in the air far enough for El Picaro to not be a factor unless Quasar or one of the Doctors picks him up and flies him to the fight... which puts him at toast range... and she goes before any of the UNITY flyers, meaning if they have to approach for Picaro to do his thing, more than likely they will instead be unconscious or dead, and El Picaro with them. A fight like this is largely going to depend on context and prep, but unless UNITY is very lucky, I expect it would go a bit better for Gravitar than you suggest.

Re: Schmucks? vs. UNITY? I dunno. They can give her a good fight - much better than Eurostar can, for example - but they have some glaring weaknesses. Quasar - He can definitely do damage sufficient to stand toe to with Gravitar, but I see one glaring weakness... his x2 STUN and BODY vs Physical KAs. Gravitar has a variety of "crushing and rending" RKAs - a 4d6, a 3d6 Indirect and even a 1d6+1 NND. At 20 CON and 50 STUN, he can easily be one-punched, and at 10 BODY, a single good roll might actually kill him. On the positive side, at least he can take the attack to her, with his flight. Mentiac - Interestingly, this little creep is possibly her most dangerous opponent in UNITY, given a 15- Find Weakness with his ray gun. On the down side, he has such pathetic defenses that any of her hits will push him into "next recovery comes sometime next week territory." Plus he has no movement capacity and a STR 10. Her Area TK will toast him. El Picaro - Having no flight greatly reduces his threat level. Sure, he can tport up to her and attack if she's flying low enough (though she need not do that, of course, given the nature of her attacks and her OCV), and he has a NND she can't defend against... but it's no range. Another low-STR ground-pounder, he's asking for the big squoosh. Dr Black and Dr White - If UNITY knows they're going up against Gravitar, this pair can provide what's needed, particularly if they put their VPPs into a significant mental attack. A coordinated Ego Attack from both could end the fight right there. On the other hand, their innate defenses are very low for someone on a team of this caliber, and again, one hit - major damage for the good Doctors. Myrmidon - The team brick won't be a factor. He lacks ranged attacks other than his spear, which he can throw once... after which, assuming Gravi is not taken down by a good hit, the spear gets tossed to the next country with her TK. Otherwise, he's a ground-pounder who isn't strong enough to resist her area TK. Gladiator - Another ground-pounder, small attacks. No threat. With good strategy and the dice not hating them, they have a pretty good shot, but I can easily see Gravi taking this one fairly often, given her level of defenses and UNITY's lack of flyers, and the fact that she has a better DEX than the people who actually present the most threat to her (the Docs, Quasar, Mentiac). I'm going to try playtesting this one out and see what happens. vs. Menton, I think UNITY had better just stay home, btw. Before any of the UNITY folk get to act, he'll likely to have both Myrmidon and Quasar Mind Controlled (Quasar's 8 pts of Mental Defense isn't going to accomplish much vs. Menton), which means the Docs are crispy-crittered and Mentiac is skewered before any of them get to act, and then it's just clean-up.

Re: Schmucks?

Re: Schmucks? This is a good point to keep in mind. I've also noted it before, but it bears repeating. Good characters have a coherent concept behind them. At a certain point level, unless people have such a concept and stick with it, some characters stop making sense. For example, one can make a pretty good version of Hawkeye or Green Arrow at 350 pts. At 450-500, you can have a fully-realized version of that particular archetype. If you're doing a campaign based on 750, your GA is, if you stick to concept, never goingt to miss any target he has any possibility of physically hitting - i.e., anything that is not desolid or in orbit or whatever. He's also going to have a wide variety of special-purpose arrows, and a great complement of skills - tracking, stealth, all that sort of stuff. What he's not going to have, hopefully, is attacks which do 20d6 AP damage. That's going outside the parameters of such a character - Hawkeye's bow just became a howitzer. Hawkeye doesn't need wings or optic-blasts or a damage shield, either. Similarly, if the Dark Avenger of the Night suddenly has body armor exceeding the defenses of Fort Knox, something is off track. The Shang Chi clone who is doing Dragonball-Z-level damage is also pretty darn questionable (though if you're trying to play a version of pre-CRISIS Karate Kid, you're probably still fine). What this means is that with some characters, unless you are being very careful, the archetype falls apart. Hawkeye and Black Canary shouldn't have stats resembling Thor. In fact, some character themes break down at very high point levels, just as some are virtually impossible to do at low points without unholy amounts of twinking. Does anyone really need a 750-point Foxbat or Squirrel Girl? It isn't even in character for some character types to be that epic. At very least, the character has to change to reflect the status - Robin grows up and becomes Nightwing. Speedsters start to break at the high point levels too, though for different reasons. First of all, unless the GM sets SPD caps for other character types, the high SPD stops being so special, since it can only go so high (12 max). Second, unless you're very point-inefficient, such a character will be able to do most of the crazy stunts guys like Flash do in the comics, which can be very hard to deal with in terms of game balance.

Re: Do you use the official Champions Universe? 2.5 - I use the general setting, but with some major variations, but I homebrew a lot of things, too.

Re: Build Champions Elite Superteam

Re: Build Champions Elite Superteam

Re: Character For review: Dryad I don't think you really need to defend. So long as you and others involved in the game have fun, cool. Keep in mind, though, that many have become annoyed with characters that seem focused more around sexual fantasy than around heroic roleplaying, whether in DnD or in CHAMPIONS, and that even if you aren't intending to portray some brain-dead sex kitten who can't keep her clothes on, many gamers have seen enough of that schtik to be pretty wary of and burnt out by anything even remotely resembling it. Some other players in the campaign could well get annoyed at a character with 30+ points of disads along the lines of "makes people drool" and " others madly attempt to get into character's pants." Anyhow, it sounds like Worldmaker is keeping those points in mind too. Here's hoping you have fun in the game. I've had to go without RPing for periods of time in the past, and missed it horribly.

Re: Fixing Martial Artists I've been doing that for over a decade. I established that rule in my Street Hero campaign, to allow for guys who fight as comptently as Daredevil but who can't head-butt car engine blocks into fragments any more than Daredevil does. That preserved the feel of the setting and also made the occasional street-level brick (a Luke Cage sort, for example) real impressive.

Re: What happened to seeker?? I'd forgotten that. The awfulness that was later-run X-FILES has, sadly, made me sometimes forget how damn good that show was in its time.

Re: Schmucks? I've played and GMed CHAMPIONS since 1983. To me, the idea that playing the game at any particular point value is right or wrong is kinda silly. It used to be that characters were based on 250 pts. That worked okay. People had fun. Some people still play at those starting point levels and have fun. Cool. These days, the default is 350 pts. That works okay. People have fun with it. Cool. Some people do games with higher points. In my current campaign, characters are built on 600 pts plus 150 in Disads, more or less. People have fun. The point is, there is no right or wrong way, so long as people are enjoying it. I tend to like 350 better than 250, as that many points make it possible to play a more well-rounded character. You have points to buy skills without having to micro-tinker your powers with Limitations. 350 allows one to make very fun, playable versions of most of the basic comic archetypes. You can make a good flying brick. You can make a competent urban martial vigilante. You can make a pretty fast guy who climbs walls and ties people up in webs. You can make a guy in power armor, or a flying, caped spellcaster, or someone who can race the wind, or even a short guy with super-sharp claws and a bad attitude and have said characters catch the basic feel of the characters in the comics who inspired such characters. That doesn't mean 250 point guys suck, though. Just different design philosophy, and differnt preferences. When I set up the "New Sentinels" game, the point was to play characters at roughly the Avengers/JLA level. I think it does a pretty good job of that, without relying too much on liberal use of "stopsign" Advantages such as Megascale, or potentially-broken ones such as Cumulative. We're having fun in the campaign - the players like playing it, and I'm having a blast running it. Can one do a game that is supposed to reflect the JLA or Avengers on fewer starting points? Sure. They might have to cut a few more points on character design, but that isn't a bad thing - only different, and even then only modestly so, because in order to reflect the power level of a JLA/Avengers game, I'm more lax on certain sorts of power framwork structures (special-effect-appropriate Skill VPPs, for example) than I would be if I was running a street-level campaign or a standard 350-pt campaign. Most of the same people who play in the New Sentinels campaign are also starting up a 350-point campaign. The characters in that campaign aren't nearly as powerful as the Sentinels, but they sure don't suck, either. I'm looking forward to playing, and I think the same is true of everyone else. I'm betting it will be just as much fun as the Sentinels game, even at less than 1/2 the points. Not better, just different, and still good. I do agree with those who point out that, for reasons of logical consistency, the established, canon CU could do with a few more powerful heroes. I think that's what Meta and some others are pointing out. Realistically, the Champions as written couldn't beat Eurostar at all, short of a) whomever played Eurostar was an idiot, and the Champions players relative strategic geniuses, or the best die-rolling luck eve on the Champs side, and the worst on Eurostar's side. But, really, so what? Some people don't use many of the established villains, particularly not the high-end ones. Others tone them down. Others have rightly noted that many of the high-end guys really are not that well-designed, and they're correct - with the same points, I could make Gravitar a lot tougher, I've done so with Menton, and I'm betting there are a lot of non-twinked 350-pointer characters out there who could take Gigaton 1/3 of the time. Still others would boost the Champions, or home-brew some powerful characters. Still others play in campaigns where 250-pt guys are incredibly powerful, because there aren't guys like Takofanes running around - and you know, in a world at all like reality, a 250-pt guy could indeed be pretty damn tough. in comparison to normal people. Now imagine how a 350-pointer could appear to the same normal people. Different ways, all okay. People can have different perspectives and have them be okay.

Re: Character for comment:Ivy Not bad. Quite good, actually. I'd probably give a Plant Powers VPP a -1/2 Lim rather than -1/4; I think the Plant one is a lot more limited than, say, a Psionics or Magic pool. I'd want to clarify that Phys Lim: Can't survive where plant growth is not possible. Does that mean she'd drop dead if she was in a house and not in a pot of soil? Does she keel over all at once, or does she take a Susceptibility sort of effect when this comes into play? Other than that, not bad at all.

Re: What happened to seeker?? I like some of the amusing options presented here. In my campaign, the 4E Champions existed, and all of them but Defender were killed by Dr. Destroyer during the Battle of Detroit. Defender got knocked out of the battle early and was outside the area of the Orbital Death Ray when it went off. Defender went on to form the current Champions (in my campaign, he's lots more experienced than the others - and all of them are more experienced than the 350-pt versions ), while his fallen comrades are remembered as valiantly giving their lives in that cataclysmic battle. BTW, where does this stuff of Mulder dying in an autoerotic asphyxiation accident come from? LOL!

Re: Character For review: Dryad It seems like a lame premise for a character to me, and is suggestive of a fairly immature view of sexuality. Sadly, I've seen so many characters of that sort over the years - including, sadly, some in the comics - that I've become somewhat deadened to them. Another good reason for toning down those disads would be to hopefully channel an okay core character concept away from such silliness.